The Kissing Tree
by devilisinthedetails
Summary: Roald has a special tree he wants to show Shinko.


The Kissing Tree

Ever punctual, Roald knocked on Shinko's door as the palace bells rang the hour they were to meet. Shinko knew his knock by its quiet firmness, but, because it would have been eager to the point of immodesty for her to rush over to the door to answer it herself, she pretended to be preoccupied with fixing the phoenix combs—that matched the phoenixes embroidered into her outer kimono—in her ink black hair and left it to her guards to open the door for her betrothed.

"His Royal Highness, Prince Roald," one of her guardsmen announced Roald, and she spun around to see her prince waiting for her in the threshold.

With Lady Haname at her heels, Shinko crossed over to Roald as quickly as she could without compromising her gracefulness. A clumsy lady, she had been taught since childhood, was an unattractive buffoon who brought shame to her family.

"Your Highness." Placing her palms on her thighs since Yamani dress dictated Yamani courtesies, Shinko bowed. Behind her, Lady Haname echoed her words with a deeper bow.

"Your Highness." Roald returned Shinko's bow with the kind done in the Eastern Lands and gave Lady Haname a gracious nod as she rose. "Lady Haname."

Holding out a bouquet of cherry blossoms, which were Shinko's favorite flowers in Tortall because they reminded her of the Yamani Islands she had left behind, Roald rather unnecessarily stated the obvious. "I've brought you flowers, Shinko."

Accepting the cherry blossoms and lifting them to her nose for a dainty, appreciative sniff, Shinko replied, "They're beautiful, and they smell sweet. Thank you, Roald."

"A beautiful, sweet lady deserves beautiful, sweet flowers." Roald flashed her one of his charmingly shy smiles as he took her arm and escorted her down the corridor to a spiral staircase that led out onto the palace gardens which were only beginning to bloom. As they climbed down the winding stone stairwell, he went on, "There's a special cherry blossom tree in the gardens that I want to show you before we leave on the Grand Progress."

"I'm excited to see it." Shinko gave her prince an appropriately elegant nod but tilted her face so that she could shoot Haname, following a few steps behind, a mischievous glance, which Haname returned with an expression that remained blank except for a shining secret in her eyes. Both of them suspected that Roald was planning on taking her to the cherry blossom tree that Yuki claimed the Tortallans referred to as the kissing tree. Yuki confessed that she had been to the kissing tree with her jade-eyed Squire Nealan but had been mysteriously deaf when asked if she had kissed him there.

Shinko supposed that she had since Yuki was a lively girl with a wicked wit, and what was the point of going to a kissing tree if not to kiss? The bigger question to Shinko was whether Roald would kiss her on the lips instead of giving her more of the chaste kisses on her fingers and cheeks that he had so far confined himself to. Shinko had found herself perilously close to staring at Roald's lips, wondering what it would be like to have them brush like butterflies across hers, when they were in otherwise polite conversation the past couple of days…

She realized that Roald was regarding her patiently, as though awaiting a response to a comment or question that required it.

"I'm sorry, Your Highness." Shinko ducked her head, feeling her cheeks warm with a blush she blamed on the breeze blowing through the hedges as they strode outside, Haname trailing at a respectable distance designed to chaperone while providing some privacy. "I was careless and didn't hear."

"I said I love your phoenix combs." As if to leave her in no doubt what he meant, Roald leaned forward to stroke the combs in her hair.

"Your Highness is kind to say so." Shinko's blush was rising even if the wind wasn't. She had worn the combs she believed from hints Roald had dropped were the prince's favorites, and it made the embers inside her that she only felt around Roald glow that he had acknowledged something as small as her combs. "I'm happy my dress pleases you."

"You can wear whatever you want, whether it pleases me or not." Roald squeezed her arm lightly as he guided her down a cobbled pathway. "You don't have to worry about pleasing me, Shinko."

"I want to please you, Roald, but I'm not worried about it," Shinko assured him, since worried implied that she feared what would happen if she displeased him, and Shinko wasn't afraid of the wrath of a fiancé who had treated her with nothing but tenderness and respect since they had met months ago. Roald, Shinko believed in her bones, would never hurt her.

"You always please me just by being yourself." Roald steered her off the path until they were standing in the shade of a black cherry blossom tree hewn with hundreds of names and initials entwined like lovers amidst dates, declarations of eternal affection, and snippets of romantic poetry. Some names and sentiments were easily legible; others had been worn like old slippers almost to invisibility by the ravages of time. Words on wood would last a long time but that was not the same as lasting forever, which only the gods and the Immortals could do.

"This tree has stood for over a century." Roald ran his thumb along an unmarked strip of bark. "Papa says that the true history of the kingdom—all its important marriages marriages and love stories—are written on here. I thought we might add our own, Shinko."

"Your father brought you here?" Shinko flicked her fan in front of her face to hide her astonishment. A romantic rendezvous didn't seem a proper destination for a father to show his son or a king his heir, but then she was learning that if there was anything predictable about her future father-in-law, it was his unpredictability, his stubborn refusal to be tucked into any neat, defining box of how he should behave.

"When I was six and Kally five, the Mithran priest who tutored us in history took ill, so Papa decided that he would fill in as history tutor, but the only problem"—Roald favored her with a wry grin—"is that Papa's weakest subject is history. He couldn't answer any of our questions, so instead he brought us here and told us this tree was the real history of the realm. After that, he always had Godsfather Gary take over our lessons when one of our tutors was sick."

"Your father is a very wise man." Shinko's eyes crinkled in amusement.

"If by that you mean he is clever enough to recognize that Godsfather Gary is smarter than him, yes, Papa is a very wise man. Speaking of Godfather Gary"—Roald pointed at an etching on the tree—"there's the marking he made with Lady Cythera."

"Gary plus Cythera equals love." Shinko squinted to read the carving Roald had indicated. "It's written like a mathematical equation."

"I expected more eloquence from the Prime Minister." Roald shook his head. "He must've indulged in one too many glasses of wine before writing something as uninspired as that."

"It's not very charitable to assume that he'd overindulged." Though her words were chiding, Shinko was confident that Roald would hear the laughter behind them.

"You're right, darling." Roald wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "He might've just been stupid with love. Many men have been known to get stupid when they love women."

"Do I make you stupid, Roald?" demanded Shinko. Indignant on behalf of her gender, she tapped his ribs with her fan.

"I was stupid long before you entered my life, Shinko." Roald chuckled and pulled her nearer to him so that her head rested beneath his chin. Changing the topic, he pointed at a G and R that were linked in a serpentine fashion along with the year 415 and remarked, "Kally and I like to imagine that's the Duke and Duchess of Naxen leaving their mark. The initials and the date is right, but for all we know it's from another couple entirely."

"This man left his name so there would be no confusion." Shinko inclined her head at an inscription: Love is a battlefield I conquer, Jasson III of Conte. Beneath Jasson III's name—in the same imperious hand but much smaller print—was written his lady's, Daneline. "An ancestor of yours, I presume."

"He loved his battles more than his lady." Roald's lips thinned. "See how tiny he carved her name, and he didn't bother mentioning where she was from though he had space for his whole title. I guess where she was from didn't matter to him. She was from Jesslaw like my friend Owen if I'm remembering my genealogy correctly."

"This one is more romantic." Shinko continued their circle of the tree. "Here's something by another Roald."

"Her eyes are the stars guiding my life, Roald to his lady Lianne." Roald murmured the inscription left by another Roald into the shell of Shinko's ear.

"It's so sweet." Shinko's fan twirled with excitement but froze as she noticed that a haunted expression had fallen over her prince's face.

"It is sweet." Roald sounded as if he had seen a ghost or just become one. "Until you realize that it drove him off a cliff, that is."

"Riding off a cliff isn't romantic." Shinko clasped Roald's hand until he looked less ashen and internally kicked herself for forgetting the whispers she had heard about King Jonathan's father committing suicide on a hunt after his wife's death. She shouldn't have dug up Conte skeletons buried long ago with her future husband. Suicide was a disgrace, not an honor, in the Eastern Lands, and was done only by the weak, not the strong. They had no concept of ritual suicide to avoid dishonor as in the Yamani Islands.

"My family doesn't do romance very well, I'm afraid, dear." Roald stroked her palm in an apology. Jerking his chin at an etching further along the tree, he added, "My friend Neal does, though. Let's have a peek at what he wrote."

To preserve Yuki's modesty, Shinko would've tried to discourage this but Roald was already reading the carving aloud, "Her eyes are the fire burning in my soul. Why does everyone always write about eyes instead of noses and teeth?"

"Yuki thinks her nose and teeth are too large." Shinko concealed her playfulness behind a smooth face. "She'd whack Neal with her fan if he drew attention to what she sees as her worst features."

"A man has to do what he must to avoid getting smacked by his lady's fan." Roald's tone was somber but his gaze was teasing as he looked down at Shinko.

"There's your knightmaster's love letter to his lady." Shinko noted a carving a handspan above Neal and Yuki's.

"It's forever spring when we're together." Roald cocked his head as he evaluated the etching left by his knightmaster. "He loses points for a cliche reference to spring but gains points for not bringing up Lady Marielle's eyes."

"This one's from your mother and father." Shinko took another step around the tree. "Wildflowers don't care where they grow—Thayet and Jonathan, 439."

"Wildflowers are Mama's favorite flower," explained Roald, smiling at the mark his parents had made before he was born. "She doesn't care for roses or lilies. She says wildflowers are more resilient and can survive anywhere, even the highlands of Sarain."

"If wildflowers are her favorite flower, that inscription is romantic." Shinko elbowed Roald. "Weren't you just telling me that your family is awful at romance?"

"My parents are ever the exception that proves the rule." Roald's lips quirked.

"I think you could also be exceptional." Shinko shot him a sidelong glance. "At least when it comes to being romantic."

"Let's put your theory to the test, Shinko." Whipping his dagger from the sheath hanging from his belt, Roald began carving in a blank spot of bark. As Shinko, suddenly breathless, watched he wrote a Common translation of one of her favorite Yamani poems that she had shared with him weeks ago: Without you, in truth, too many and too wide are the groves. Under the poetry, he etched his name and then passed his knife to her that she might do the same.

Once she had bullied her somehow shaking fingers into writing her name, Roald slipped his hand over hers before she could add a date, whispering into her hair like the breeze wafting the scent of cherry blossoms around them, "Let's not date ourselves as my parents did, darling."

"We'll remain timeless," agreed Shinko, drowning in the oceans of her betrothed's eyes as he lowered his mouth to hers. His lips were soft and sweet as the petals of the cherry blossoms he had given her, and, though the kiss lasted less than a moment, it stretched into eternity as all the time she spent falling in love with Roald seemed to do.


End file.
